Math Discoveries About Data and Chance, Grades 3 to 4

Students explore the concepts of chance through experiments with drawing linking cubes from a bag, spinning spinners, and rolling dice. They find possible outcomes and the chances for the outcomes to occur. Students make predictions, thenexperiment and record their results in tables and line plots. They play games involving chance, and decide whether the games are fair or not. Students collect and display data with linking cubes, pictographs, glyphs, bar graphs, and circle graphs.Students explore he meaning of mode, average, and range. These hands-on explorations actively engage students in doing mathematics, which is emphasized by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).